As brutal as it might be to say, Alan Ritchson proved Tom Cruise was the worse Jack Reacher between the two. Even so, unlike its predecessors, a third movie in the series could’ve gained an audience if it had been stamped with an R-rating.
In an interview with Empire, Cruise’s regular film-making buddy, Christopher McQuarrie, revealed that he had plans for the theoretical “Jack Reacher 3” to get a hard R. “Tom and I were talking about, had the series continued, to take Reacher to a place where, in the post-‘Deadpool,’ post-‘Joker’ world, ‘Reacher’ could have been an R-rated movie and an R-rated franchise and really fed into the brutality of those books,” he said. “We were fully ready to lean into that.”
Of course, this threequel never happened, and instead, the torch was passed to Ritchson, who is set to return for Season 3 of “Reacher.” Regarding Cruise’s version, McQuarrie said, “It’s a very un-Tom character, and we have plans for an even more un-Tom character that we’ve been talking about, which I’m hopeful about in the future.”
While this may have been a plan in motion in 2020, there might still be a chance that the other “un-Tom” character could make an appearance eventually now that the star has signed his massive deal with Warner Bros. Sure, his Jack Reacher might not be one of them, but perhaps without Cruise’s version, we would’ve never got the one we have now.
